Screenhead

It’s extraordinarily difficult to write a review of a movie like The Fourth Kind because it’s not really a movie so much as it is an agenda.

Clearly, someone desperately wants us to believe that what we’re seeing is actually really really REALLY REAL, and won’t be satisfied until, my guess is, we start pestering our Congress critters for answers.  I’m not sure.  Because I’ve never left a movie so utterly confused, and I’ve seen David Croenenburg movies.

This one follows Dr. Abigail Emily Tyler, who is played by Milla Jovovich, who actually TELLS us that’s what she’ll be doing in the beginning of the movie.  And we’ll be following her around as she conducts a sleep disorder study on the people of Nome, Alaska.  Now, Nome is downright infamous for being hard to reach, but apparently it’s also got a serious missing persons problem, and it’s somehow become the FBI travel destination of choice, garnering over two thousand official visits when neighbor Anchorage, who has something like seventy times the population, rates only about three hundred visits in that same time frame.

Now, it’s hard to tell at first glance just how much of this is real and how much of it so utterly fake as to be a complete pantload, because the movie is trying so very desperately hard to convince us that EVERYTHING WE SEE IS HAPPENING FOR REALS, YO, by virtue of running split screen so often I thought I was watching 24.  They’ll do two splits and three splits and four splits and four splits with rotating frames.  It got to the point where I wondered, is this a movie or a Final Cut Pro demo?  And they’ll run, almost ad nauseum, “real footage” alongside footage of the actors, to try and cement that belief.

I’ll freely admit that this is some creepy stuff–when that guy started levitating I got a little freaked out, and Abigail Tyler “herself” under hypnosis was a cold chill up my spine but do I believe this actually went down?  No.

See, one great line from the movie that manages to describe the movie in its entirety is where one of the “patients” is muttering that he’s okay, and “Dr. Tyler” swings in with “Are you trying to convince me or yourself?”  And that’s exactly what I thought of this movie.  Yes, okay, you’re going to RELENTLESSLY show me this “real footage” and insist, as loudly and vociferously as possible that it’s real, and frankly, I kind of doubt it.

Folks, this has allegedly been going on since the year 2000.  But somehow it took almost TEN YEARS for someone to exploit it?  Come ON.  We’re talking about a Hollywood scene so desperate that TWO GARFIELD MOVIES looked like a good idea but we’ve got allegedly actual footage of a woman shrieking that she’s god in SUMERIAN and NO ONE’S ran with that ball yet?

The Screenhead Ten Scale joins me in a dismissive back of hand “bah” to this creepy but horrendously disjointed fright fest and acknowledges that the idea is pretty scary but forces my suspension of disbelief engines to glow white hot and give off an ominous whining noise.  Thus, it hands this incredulous horror romp a five out of ten for being creepy yet not even vaguely credible.

No, really.

There’s a short film on YouTube–in retrospect it never should have been this big of a surprise–called The Horribly Slow Murderer With The Extremely Inefficient Weapon.

And as Jack Cucchiaio finds himself running from his life from the poorly armed maniac, he finds himself in a race against time–an extremely slow race, granted, but a race nonetheless!–to find out the truth behind this killer before the killer can finish his deadly, extremely long term, project.

I about laughed myself stupid watching this.  Seriously–these are guys who know their horror movies, because they’re frantically mocking virtually every convention ever involved in a horror movie.  Watching this horribly slow murder go down was just hilarious.  And yet at the same time, a little creepy.  They really knew what they were doing, and so I recommend it openly.  The movie itself actually drags on, much like the killing itself.

So does the Screenhead Ten Scale, which knows a laugh when it sees it.  Short film or no, this is hilarious stuff and absolutely deserves its eight out of ten.

I am NOT a huge fan of Jack Ketchum’s work.  Ever since I saw The Lost–in which only I really lost, about ninety minutes of my life and a sinking feeling that someone somehow was making a living at writing torture porn–I looked at pretty much everything he did with a sinking suspicion.

So when I settled in with a copy of Offspring, one of the newest parts of the Ghost House Underground collection, which the folks at Lions Gate sent my way, I wasn’t expecting much good to come of it.  Were my suspicions met?  You’ll find out directly.

First, the plot.  We’re going back to Maine, a land that Stephen King pretty much managed to convert almost singlehandedly into the horror capitol of the world.  But the town of Dead River is playing host to a secret that even King might have had a hard time swallowing–a clan of flesh-eating monstrosities that propagates seemingly entirely by abduction.  And when the local sheriff is forced to step in and deal with them, he’s reminded all too clearly of the last time he took these killers on.

This one is, somewhat, different.  In fact, “graphically screwed up” might be a better term.  In fact, if you want to get an idea of what it’s like, imagine Clan of the Cave Bear intermingled with The Hills Have Eyes.  And you’ll be mostly horrified, but at the same time, you’ll be so catastrophically weirded out by the whole thing that you’ll scarcely know what to think.  Watching these dirt people tear apart actual humans and eat flesh is…well…it’s not the kind of thing you’ve seen lately, I guarantee that.

It’s graphic, it’s violent, it’s grotesque in the absolute…but it IS unique.  And that definitely gives it at least a point in its favor.  But the sheer horrendousness of the content leaves it difficult to recommend.

It’s downright painful to be looking at a movie that’s the most unique thing I’ve seen in a good while, but have it be so thoroughly repugnant that it’s tough to recommend.  It’s really just painful.

The Screenhead Ten Scale shares my consternation and hands The Offspring a thoroughly confused five out of ten.  It’s too unique to not bear mentioning, but it’s too downright vulgar to encourage anyone to watch.

You’ve got to give the crew behind Creeper a little credit for effort–they recorded all their own music to add onto this three minute short film. It’s too bad that that’s pretty much the only area in which they succeeded.

In this one, a young man finds himself running afoul of some random monster or possibly human that sounds like he’s been chain-smoking rope since the eighties.  Anyway, this human / monster thing is dispatched to kill the young man for some reason, but we don’t know what that reason is.  All we know is, his time is UP.

And yes, the musical score is pretty nifty, but what they forgot to do was actually make a movie.  There’s no coherent plot here outside of some fart noises on voice mail and a guy getting killed for no clear reason.  I’m not even sure whether the guy that did the killing was a man or a monster.  And what’s with all the coughing?  The movie was actually TOO short, leaving a lot of its issues unresolved.

There are a great many questions that I don’t have answers to because Creeper didn’t bother to create them.

The Screenhead Ten Scale respects the musical side of this whole short endeavor, but at the same time, can’t help but be a little unsettled by the fact that there’s not much of a, you know, MOVIE here.  It thusly hands out a three out of ten.

So Lions Gate has brought up a bit of that old retro horror with the rerelease of The Gate, now out on DVD. And as always, the question we’re out to tackle today is, is it worth your rental dollar?

The plot is a little convoluted, and basically requires you to suspend disbelief like no tomorrow.  But after an old tree is pulled out of a suburban family’s backyard, it’s left a whole lot of trouble in its wake.  Like a load of fairly valuable geodes.  And a reeking pit in the backyard that just happens to be full of demons.  TINY demons.

And now it’s left to the kids of the suburban family to take on the horde of tiny demons that have burst forth from the hole in the backyard.

See, this may sound just plain old loopy to horror buffs of the modern era, but this kind of thing happened ALL THE TIME in eighties horror flicks, especially ones that carried that malign PG-13 rating, the rating usually reserved for half-baked slasher flicks today.

And frankly, it IS loopy.  How do we discover what’s going on under the surface?  Simple–the characters learn about it from the album cover of a heavy metal band from “Europe”, and more than likely, from Finland.  Because as we all know now, thanks to Metalocalypse and the various Lordi incursions, Finland and metal go together like peanut butter and jelly.

The farther in you get in this thing, the steadily more insane the whole thing gets.  In fact, it’s like that loopy uncle of yours that lives in the attic and won’t stop screaming about how the government’s putting mind control suicide chips in the flouride in the water–it’s absolutely insane, and yet at the same time, it’s also entertaining in a creepy sort of way.

If you’re up for a history lesson, then The Gate will provide it.  If you just want a creepy and fun little movie with some occasional scares, then The Gate will provide that too.

The Screenhead Ten Scale can’t help but give due props to this piece of the past, and thus issues a seven out of ten for being fun, even if absolutely looney.

When a film company titles itself Mediocre Films, it’s hard to tell whether you should expect their work to be good or expect to be, well, mediocre.  But today’s short film, a fairly interesting piece from Mediocre entitled Trick or Treat, is at least fairly good.

Two guys are hanging out in one of their houses and talking about movies they should make when they get the idea to make a documentary.   Wondering who would make the best documentary target, they hit on a random stranger hanging around outside the house who knocks on the door with one message–trick or treat.  But when we find out more about the random stranger, we discover that he brings plenty of trouble in his trick or treat bag.

It’s hard to tell where Trick or Treat is going, primarily because it makes almost no sense at all for most of its six minute run time.  By the time it gets to the horror part of the show, you’re so abjectly lost that literally anything could happen.  This is actually an interesting effect as most horror flicks like to telegraph their punches from the word go, but this one will keep you guessing.

In fact, if you can stay interested until the very end, you’ll likely discover that the whole thing makes a lot more sense looking back than going forward, and that’s a lot like life itself.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this strange analogy for life itself a six out of ten–it’s confusing, yes, but it’s also funny and just a bit creepy, and that’s a great combination.

Remember how, when I wrote about The Haunting of Winchester House, how GREAT I thought it was that The Asylum was finally getting out of the mockbuster trend and no longer Asylumizing movies?

Sadly, that’s all gone as The Asylum releases 2012 Supernova, which is pretty much taking on 2012.  The only problem is that, of course, The Asylum doesn’t have anywhere NEAR the cash required to make those kind of special effects.

The plot, though, is actually pretty interesting–two hundred years ago, a star exploded and launched an enormous wave of radiation.  Sadly, two hundred years ago was apparently during the War of 1812, because it’s about to hit in much-popularized 2012.  So now a group of scientists is out to launch a whole load of nukes into the upper atmosphere so they can augment the Earth’s natural anti-radiation shielding.

I’ll admit, though, that The Asylum clearly does the best it can with what it has to work with.  What baffles me, though, is that they try to take on this monster projects with the most minimalist budgets you can imagine.  It’s like trying to eat a Ho-Ho the size of a Buick, and doing it with a knife and fork.

The result, however, of trying to load a bunch of AA batteries in a space designed for a Diehard is that the whole thing has this vaguely repetitive feel in which a simulated disaster happens, then we react to that disaster, then another one happens, and so on and so forth without much in the way of an overarching plotline to hold it all together.

There will be plenty of thrills here–watching people try to escape from things blowing up and whatnot–but are these thrills going to be enough to hold the overall picture together?  Well, that’s your call, in the end.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile,  isn’t so impressed and thus hands the newest Asylum knockoff a fair enough five out of ten.  it clearly tried, but it just couldn’t tackle what it set out to try.

You know, I’ve seen PLENTY of horror movies focusing on elevators.  Black Out, The Shaft, there was even a lot of elevator action figuring into the old Dario Argento title Demons 2.  The thought of being stuck in an elevator or falling down an elevator shaft fills more than a few people with cold dread.  So it’s not too much of a surprise to see Hellevator, a movie that tries to play on that cold dread.

This time, it’s about what it sounds like–an elevator that goes straight to hell itself.  And for one young man, it’s going to be the ride of his afterlife.

It’s an interesting idea, and they did manage to get some clever action movie dialogue in there–for a short film, this is an especially decent idea.  The big problem with it, though, is that only occasionally are snippets of dialogue so loud as to be heard.  I had my speakers up nice, and the YouTube volume itself on full–which blasts a video I found of Rehab’s Sitting At A Bar just fine.

But aside from that, Hellevator is a nifty concept poorly executed, so you know what the Screenhead Ten Scale’s got in mind: a five out of ten.

Despite social websites such as wikipedia becoming instututions for those in search of knowledge, the film industry hasn’t found a way of utilising this method for film-making. The best example so far has been Voices of Iraq, the 2004 documentary featuring footage of the public of the world’s most dangerous country shot by themselves. It was  fascinating project that provided the world with a perspective that was virtually unavailable until then. However, this year sees the release of another wikipedia-inspired documentary, albeit this time in a very different genre.

All Tomorrow’s Parties may be a classic Velvet Underground song, but it is also an alternative music festival that originated in the UK (since then it has spread to the US, Australia, and Spain, for special occasions). Hosted in an economy holiday camp, each festival has a famous curator who picks all of the other acts, making it a 3-day live mix-tape. Previous curators have included Simpsons curator Matt Groening, actor Vincent Gallo, and acts such as Nick Cave, Sonic Youth, Mogwai, and Portishead. Across the years roadies, fans, and organisers have been filming performances, mostly for personal use, but now that footage has gone to a much better use. All Tomorrow’s Parties is a documentary about the festival, a collage of iconic performances and amusing moments across the festival’s 10 years, including some interviews that will prove fascinating for anyone interested in alternative music.

Kicking off with a live performances of the thundering Battles song Atlas, the doc cuts between performances, the activities of the fans at and outside the gigs, and also archive footage of the holiday site back in its heyday, all with a frenzied pace. The connection is the notion of social gathering. Today the holiday sites of the festival are an opportunity to bring together a community of people who look beyond the mainstream for their music and entertainment. And the documentary manages to catch a glimpse of the spirit of the festival’s community with many shots of its fans and their escapades (from getting drunk to dancing, to waxing lyrical about society). It also provides some magic moments, such as semingly impomptu performances from artists outside their cabin accommodation or on the site’s beach. Singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston sits on the grass playing an acoustic set to anyone walking by, indie-crooners Grizzly Bear harmonise on the beach at night, and hardcore noise duo Lightning Bolt deliver an intense set (that gets complaints from the resident neighbours) outside of the organiser’s cabin. All of these moments combine to offer a real sense of not only what this festival provides, but any modern music festival. And even though it’s a shame that we don’t get to see any songs performed in their entirety, All Tomorrow’s Parties is a perfect document for fans of alt-rock, indie, electronic, or anything outside of the kind of drivel we hear in American Idol.

The documentary will be available to download on the official website from next week.

I have to admit, some of the most interesting movies I get copies of to review are the documentaries.  Strange little pieces about strange little things, like the entire career of H.P. Lovecraft.  And today, I’m bringing out a documentary of the kind the History Channel would probably love–War Dogs of the Pacific.

They mean it literally, you see–War Dogs of the Pacific is all about the dogs who fought in the Pacific theater in World War II.   They were trained pretty extensively, and they served a whole host of roles in the war, including guard duty, ferreting out enemy positions, sensing enemy movement, and even outright combat. See, back in the last days of World War II, the Pacific was about the only game in town left.  And the Japanese had developed an especial talent for hiding and attacking from ambush, so the idea came to use dogs to track hiding places.  And boy, did it ever work.

This movie is spectacularly informative, and will almost certainly tell you at least something new about World War II and about the role that dogs played in this war.  It’s a downright amazing role, too–considering that people back then handed over their pet dogs to serve in the war, in some cases for good,  is just plain old amazing.

Of course, getting past the sheer awesomeness of the idea, you’re left with a pretty good if somewhat short documentary–this has a runtime of about forty five minutes.  But it’s a pretty sweet forty five minutes, especially if you love documentaries or war movies.

The Screenhead Ten Scale loves this movie, but it realizes its tastes are a little unique, and thus hands War Dogs of the Pacific an eight out of ten for giving us all an excellent, if esoteric, view of World War II.